hoppermagic newsblog

A new look for hannahteare.com

2009-11-05T20:33:39+00:00

We've been busy of late refining our original work on hannahteare.com. More and more of the new images were landscape in format, and the existing design wasnt really doing them justice. The new system shows the work off to maximum effect as well as allowing busy Art Directors to navigate through the portfolio quickly and easily. The site is also cms driven (using modx) giving the client the ability to change content. The shoot featuring the Pucci prints has to be seen to be believed.

Visit the site

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T21:24:09+00:00

I was quite pleased with this bit of pumpkin carving until I came across the pumpkin version of the Death Star on Fantasy pumpkins - where else! Apparently it took about 9 hours to produce, maybe i'll start carving a bit earlier next year.

Fantasy pumpkins

Web navigation is about moving forward

2009-08-31T15:38:59+00:00

I stumbled on this article by Gerry McGovern whilst doing some interface work, which was drowning fast under a sea of links.

"Your job is not to design for all possible directions someone might want to take. Your job is to understand the primary direction your most important customers are heading, and to remove obstacles in the way of them arriving at that destination."

Rather than overloading users with a page of links, you need to focus on the task they're trying to complete, and present them with navigation options that best enable them to do it. There's some other interesting articles and perspectives on gerrymcgovern.com too, its well worth a look.

Bunny chairs

2009-08-17T12:33:18+00:00

Check out this interesting installation by LAVA (laboratory for visionary architecture) for the Sherman contemporary art foundation. The backlit honeycomb cells are the star of the show, but how cool are those bunny chairs! Thanks for the tip Caspar :)

Winter in Melbourne

2009-08-02T02:38:38+00:00

I'm currently enjoying myself in Melbourne, Australia as part of a 30th birthday celebration. Its quite a shock going from the UK summer (average as it is) to winter in Melbourne - which is surprisingly cold. I'm about to escape up north to Queensland for some sunshine :)

View more photos

Faile Bunny Girl

2009-07-06T20:21:50+00:00

I spotted this lovely artwork in our local pub, and after some intensive googling and two narrow ebay loses, we finally have a copy adorning the walls of Hoppermagic HQ. It is of course a print of Faile's iconic 'Bunny girl' image, and you can even find the bunny loitering around Brick Lane if you look hard enough.

An evening with Cheryl Cole

2009-05-28T12:26:50+00:00

Been working very hard of late but I managed to find time for some r'n'r, in the form of Girls Aloud at Wembley Arena. The highlight of the show was when the mighty Aloud floated across the crowd on a giant walkway. You can probably make out Cheryl in the black stockings, and yes its fair to say the outfits were quite racy. There's also been a tough regime of sit-ups along the way by the looks of things. Oh and the music was quite good too. Coming next in the gig review section we'll be reviewing Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds Live, stay tuned....

First Sharify application launches

2009-05-08T12:10:00+00:00

The first Adobe AIR application built using the Sharify payment system has just been released. Called Nihongoup, the application is a fun educational tool for learning Japanese. Having no Japanese skills we don't know exactly what's going on but it looks terrific and its great to see Sharify up and running in the wild.

Nihongoup website

Social media marketing

2009-04-13T14:26:59+00:00

There's an interesting debate on Matt Haughey's blog about the merits of social media marketing vs just making a product that's so brilliant that it finds its way to the top organically:

"So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need 'social media marketing' after all."

Obviously its not a black and white issue, you have to do something when you start up to get the ball rolling, and as someone points out, what do you do if your competition has a better product, surely you don't just give up....

...well if you're trying to market Microsoft's Zune maybe you should. A survey of teenagers has found 100 per cent will buy one of Apple's music players in the next year. Of those questioned only 4% had a Zune and no amount of Twittering by Microsoft will improve this.

Hoppermagic updates

2009-04-07T20:34:16+00:00

The latest version of Hoppermagic is finally live, hooray! There's been a few graphical tweaks, but the main thing is we're now fully content managed using Expression Engine for the CMS. It was a relatively painless process, and I thought I'd share a couple of EE plugins that I've found useful:

File Extension by Mark Huot makes it easier to upload multiple images for a blog entry.

LG Social bookmarks takes the hassle out of adding bookmarks to your posts as it works out the paths you need for each service.

SS Friendly this one works in conjunction with your 404 page, it examines the final segment of the url to suggest content on your site that best matches the incorrect url.... So if you try this dodgy link for example www.hoppermagic.com/shair it will give you a sensible suggestion. It's all in the details :)